About Jordan Flaherty

Jordan Flaherty

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and community organizer based in New Orleans. He was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story to worldwide attention. His post-Katrina writing in ColorLines Magazine shared a journalism award from New America Media for best Katrina-related coverage in the Ethnic press, his reporting has been featured in the New York Times, and audiences around the world have seen the news segments he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now.

Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit TV,and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public Radio. He has been a regular correspondent or frequent guest on Democracy Now, Radio Nation onAir America, News and Notes, and many other outlets. As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty has been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as BlackCommentator.organd Black Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Jordan is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a national publicationdedicated to covering social movements. He has written about politics and culture for the Village Voice, New York Press, Labor Notes, Radical Society, and in several anthologies, including the South End Press books Live From Palestine and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation, the University of Georgia Press book What is a City, and the AK Press book Red State Rebels.

Jordan Flaherty

Flaherty’s articles from the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina have appeared in periodicals around the world, including Die Zeit in Germany, Clarin in Argentina, Juventude Rebelde in Cuba, Red Pepper in England, and many more from Lebanon to Paris to New Zealand to South Africa. In the US, his articles have appeared in a wide range of publications from The Indypendent in New York to The SF Bay View in Californiato literally hundreds of blogs and web-based journals including Huffington Post, CommonDreams, AlterNet, Counterpunch, and ZNet. In the first months after the hurricane, his writings were translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.

He has been invited to speak at dozens of colleges, universities and conferences including engagements at Columbia University, Stanford Law School, New York University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at Los Angeles, SUNY Stonybrook, American University in Washington DC, Loyola University Chicago, University of Florida, University of Chicago, University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Loyola University New Orleans, University of New Orleans, Xavier University, and many others.

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Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six By Jordan Flaherty With an introduction by Democracy Now host Amy Goodman And a preface by civil rights attorney Tracie Washington

Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina. The book weaves the interconnected stories of Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, gay rappers, spoken word poets, victims of police brutality, out of town volunteers, and grassroots activists. From post-Katrina evacuee camps, to torture testimony at Angola Prison, to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, Floodlines tells the stories behind the headlines, from an unforgettable time and place in history.

TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS:

Please assign FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six in your classes for Fall of 2010. The book has already been added to the curriculum for courses at Xavier University, Tulane University and University of New Orleans.